(Inside Higher Ed)
Since the deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October, campuses have seen a rise in displays targeting Jews.
By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, December 5, 2018
• The spray-painted graffiti on the office walls of Elizabeth Midlarsky, the Columbia clinical psychologist and Holocaust scholar. The New York Police Department is investigating the vandalism. As a researcher of the Holocaust, Midlarsky has been targeted before. More than a decade ago, she discovered anti-Semitic fliers had been slipped into her mailbox and a swastika was painted on her office door.
• A swastika was painted over a mural honoring the victims of the synagogue shooting at Duke University. Duke officials were quick to denounce the memorial being sabotaged, with the Duke president writing to campus that it was a “craven and cowardly act.”
• Three swastikas were discovered at Cornell University. Two were reported in residence halls, and the other was drawn in snow on campus. Ryan Lombardi, vice president for student and campus life, put out a statement to “express his revulsion” at the symbols.
• A Jewish fraternity at Pennsylvania State University, Zeta Beta Tau, had its menorah vandalized and then stolen. The menorah was eventually recovered, but according to Penn State president Eric Barron, the menorah (and the Jewish community) had "lasting damage."
• A University of Minnesota residence hall was vandalized with unspecified anti-Semitic messages. An email sent to the campus stated that the messages referenced Nazis and white supremacy, and that the university is unclear on who is responsible.
• A student at Goucher College, in Maryland, was arrested for racist and anti-Semitic graffiti found in a residence hall. Fynn Ajani Arthur, 21, had allegedly painted a backward swastika in a dorm and targeted Latinx and black students. Arthur, who is black, later drew more swastikas around the building and wrote the last names of four black students, including himself.
• Fliers blaming Jews for the sexual assault allegations against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were found on the University of California, Berkeley, and Davis campuses, and at Vassar College and Marist College. They depict caricatures of Jewish members of the U.S. Senate, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, surrounding Kavanaugh. The signs proclaim “every time some anti-white, anti-American, anti-freedom event takes place, you look at it, and it’s Jews behind it.”....
(Inside Higher Ed)
The new study on costs of various departments.
By Matt Reed - December 5, 2018
…“Hard” vocational programs are more expensive to run than “soft” academic ones. The least expensive classes to run are the ones that can run well with thirty students per section, and without any specialized equipment. That tends to describe the Intro to Psychs of the world. Hands-on classes in vocational areas require more equipment, more people to tend the equipment, and more instructors per student. In practice, we engage in cross-subsidy, with the profits generated by, say, History offsetting some of the losses generated by, say, Nursing. This matters because many outsiders assume that if we could just drop the “ivory tower” stuff and focus entirely on job readiness, the budget would balance. In fact, we’d go bankrupt. If you want to remake community colleges as entirely vocational, be prepared to pony up more money. A lot more….
